Political leaders must consider whether big ships, small fleet strategy will protect U.S. given new security threats.

When it comes to the Navy, we can have a big fleet of small ships, or a small fleet of big ships. For quite a while now, we’ve gone with the big ships, but some people are arguing that that’s a mistake.

One of those is Commander Phillip E. Pournelle, U.S. Navy, who recently wrote in the Proceedings of the U.S. Naval Institute that “In an age of precision-strike weapon proliferation, a big-ship navy equals a brittle fleet. What’s needed is a revamped force structure based on smaller surface combatants.”

He makes some excellent points. Currently, the U.S. Navy dominates the seas. A U.S. Navy Carrier Battle Group can project power in a way no other nation’s navy can approach, essentially placing a large airbase within striking range of pretty much any place on the planet worth striking.

Of course, the problem with this is that aircraft carriers aren’t just powerful. They’re also big, expensive and vulnerable. (The non-carrier part of a Carrier Battle Group is basically there to protect the carrier from submarines and missiles).

Other nations know this and have spent a good deal of effort on figuring out ways to sink U.S. aircraft carriers. Human ingenuity being what it is, sooner or later one of those efforts will succeed. The sinking of one carrier would be a disaster; the sinking of multiple carriers would be a debacle on the order of Pearl Harbor when the battleships that in those days formed the core of U.S. naval strength turned out to be hideously vulnerable to ... aircraft launched from aircraft carriers.

Pournelle argues that the rise of things like anti-ship cruise missiles (ASCMs) may represent a similar sea-change in the naval environment and that we need to be ready to deal with that. “The foremost operational effect,“ he writes, “is a brittleness of the fleet. The tactical impact detailed earlier has influenced U.S. Navy operations today. The deployment of advanced ASCMs to Syria posed an increased threat to ships should they have been off the coast. Commanders will increasingly be reticent to deploy small numbers of large-signature ships in this deadly environment for fear of potentially losing a significant amount of firepower in the loss of a single ship. From that follows a loss of influence. With smaller numbers of ships, the United States will lack the ability to simply be present to shape events.”

Well, nobody wants to abolish aircraft carriers, but Pournelle argues that more effort should go into smaller ships, ships that are harder to destroy because they’re less conspicuous, and less disastrous to lose because they’re much smaller. In addition, if you have more ships, they can be in more places at once. Small ships might not contribute much in a huge World War II style sea battle, but if you’re, say, stopping ships to inspect them for smuggled weapons or people, they’re superior: An aircraft carrier isn’t much good for that sort of thing.

If you want global sea control, you need enough ships to cover the globe, and a navy that’s made up of small numbers of big ships isn’t very good at that. If 80% of life is showing up, a navy with more ships can show up in more places.

Plus, small ships don’t take nearly as long to build as big ones. If war looms, it’s easier to ramp up small-ship production. That’s a genuine advantage.

As the world becomes a potentially more dangerous place, the next president and Congress are going to have to think hard about whether approaches to war and defense that have served us well over the last half-century still make sense in the new era. I found Pournelle’s essay very interesting and hope that decision-makers will pay attention.